Clara Ho and Grace Fong, "New Frontiers in Women's Literature and History"

Harvard University presents a workshop with Clara Ho and Grace Fong on that will consider two new areas of inquiry in the study of women's writing.

This workshop will consider two new areas of inquiry in the study of women's writing. Clara Ho of Hong Kong Baptist University will present her research on China's women historians, a group vastly underrepresented in contemporary understanding. She will further contrast their work with the writings of male historians on similar themes. Another understudied area is non-historical prose. Grace Fong of McGill University will explore how such writing sheds light on women writers of the Ming and Qing. Her work on women's textual production of this era offers new insight into the question of why women's prose is comparatively difficult to find. She will introduce some intriguing exceptions to this general trend and will discuss what scholarship of today can learn from the prose works that survive.

Ban Zhao and Others: In Search of Women Historians in Imperial China
Clara Wing-chung Ho, Hong Kong Baptist University
The writing and reading of history seems to have been a male-monopolized enterprise in imperial China. Ban Zhao was the only woman historian included in a collective biography of Chinese historians. In a widely circulated dictionary of Chinese historians, which offers a total of 2,643 entries, merely 6 entries are dedicated to women. Among these 6 women, only 2 lived entirely in the imperial era.  Professor Ho will share her current project on rediscovering women’s under-represented voices in Chinese historiography.

Clara Wing-chung Ho is professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University and currently a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor at Northeastern University.  Her research interests include women, gender, children, eunuchs, and historiography in imperial China. She is the editor of several volumes including Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644-1911 (1998; Chinese edition 2010); Windows on the Chinese World: Reflections by Five Historians (2009); Overt and Covert Treasures: Essays on the Sources for Chinese Women’s History (2012); and Xingbie shiye zhong de Zhongguo lishi xinmao (A new look at Chinese history through the lens of gender, 2012).  Her single-authored books include Nüxing yu lishi: Zhongguo chuantong guannian xintan (Women and history: a reappraisal of traditional Chinese views, 1993); Zhongguo gudai de yu’er (Child-rearing in traditional China, 1997), and De cai se quan: Lun Zhongguo gudai nüxing (Virtue, talent, beauty, and power: women in ancient China, 1998).

What Else Did Women Write besides Poetry and Tanci in Late Imperial China?
Grace S. Fong, McGill University
The recent rediscovery of large numbers of individual women’s collected works and, more importantly, their greater accessibility through online resources and reprints are complicating existing views regarding both the enabling and constraining grounds for women’s textual production. Grace Fong will review some unusual, recently rediscovered, prose texts: Chen Ershi’s (1785-1821) twenty-seven letters to her husband written between 1817 and 1818, Zong Wan’s (1810-ca.1883) diary for the year 1877, and Xu Yezhao’s (1736-1795) exclusively prose collection to highlight issues of motivation, function, and context of the production and publication of writings by women.

Grace S. Fong is professor of Chinese literature at McGill University. She is editor of the Women and Gender in China Studies series published by Brill and Project Director of Ming Qing Women’s Writings (http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/), an expanding online digital archive and database that began as a joint project with the Harvard-Yenching Library. Her recent publications include Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (University of Hawaii Press, 2008);《美國哈佛大學哈佛燕京圖書館藏明清婦女著述彙刊》 (A Collection of Ming and Qing Women’s Writings in the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University) (廣西師範大學出版社, 2009), co-edited with Wilt Idema; and The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing (Brill, 2010), co-edited with Ellen Widmer.